Scenes from a Wedding

WEDDING IS CAUSE for celebration. Like all gala events, this exhibit of marriage photographs from the mid-19th century to the present is full of panoply, gaudy or elegant--full of subtle nuances. Wedding makes not only artistic statements, but social ones as well.

The first collection in the Social History archives of the Carpenter Center, archives which are presently being designed and organized by Barbara P. Norfleet, Wedding documents the most important ritual in American society. For all recent heresy, the majority of Americans still silently believe in marriage, and those who have denied it do so with the slight thrill of blasphemy. The institution of marriage seems to matter.

Such a symbolic rite generates ritual objects, dedicated to the potential event. Wedding is a collection of such talismen. These photos were intended as documentation of an important moment, but, more significantly, they were created to evoke a mood, inspire some faith. Like votive offerings at a shrine, they do not merely record a commitment, they reaffirm and even manufacture that commitment. Pictures of a marriage are magic, or at least those involved want them to be.

Photographing a wedding has itself become dogmatic ritual. The repertoire of picture, now a liturgy of stylized question and response, has been made part of the sacrament. Each type of picture evolved asks for a certain image. The set-up of the formal portrait of the bride in gown and bouquet, for example, is designed to elicit a stock response of romantic wistfulness, (or regality, depending on the age of the bride involved). The family group picture produces a series of fixed, forced grins.

For the convenience of the photographer and his client, many of the posed photographs are now taken long before or long after the event. "The formal of the bride," James Purcell of Bachrach Studios remarks, "is taken two weeks before the wedding with fake flowers. They photograph just as well." But the difference is visible; the formal portraits of more recent date are stiffer, more defensive. What Herbert Talerman calls the "gorgeous innocence of those early people," the proud hauteur of the bride who felt herself being immortalized by the camera, gives way to a nervous reserve as the formal portrait comes to be considered an artifact.

"Wedding photography was totally changed by the introduction of the candid about 1940," the catalog of Wedding claims. "Photography could record the spontaneity of life, the private moment." Many of the photographers whose pictures are contained in Wedding seem to recognize the dichotomy of "portrait vs. candid," and define themselves and their work in those terms. "I don't want to put down candids, but we portraitists have our eyes on something--a moment of grandeur," Bradford Bachrach says. "Candids are for the moment but portraits are for all time." Martin Schweig presents the opposite view. "I prefer candids; in the studio everything is phony except the photographer." Splitting Wedding between "Formal Portraits" and "Candids" (with a short "History" section), Norfleet has enforced this division.

But it makes little difference whether this mass is said in the formal shot's scholastic Latin or in the more familiar vulgate of the candid snap. A couple's expectations of their wedding pictures are formalized to the point where the behavior of the photographer can only have a minimal influence. In fact, many people have defined how the photographer should behave, cast him in a role in the ceremony.

Schweig tells of a woman who "asked me to take pictures as the bridesmaids came down the aisle. I resisted because I don't want to be intrusive and you need flash with moving people in a church. It turned out she didn't care if I had film in the camera, she just wanted her guests to see the flashes."

Several of the photographers of the exhibit sense that this woman is not alone. Talerman predicts that soon "it won't be the people's wedding anymore, it will be the photographers'. A few stylized and pre-planned shots are latched onto and people don't realize what is happening to them. Twenty years later...they will miss their wedding." Clearly, the image is all-important.

The exhibit shows the changes of this image over the last hundred years. The earlier formal portraits present the upper middle class surrounded by the proud symbols of wealth and status--bridal pictures from the turn of the century contain Victorian carpets, chairs and paintings. The tradition hasn't disappeared; John Howell's brides still pose in front of windows draped in velvet, or parade on polished marble in front of elegant settees. But more and more, as Bachrach says, "The upper middle class kids are turning away from wanting formal portraits. They want only candids and stainless steel. It is the ethnic groups who now want the formal portraits and silver." One class aspires to the values of another and imitates them, changing the symbols they adopt even as they acquire them.

Wedding reveals racial as well as class conflict. Clem McLarty, whose pictures are among the most honest in the show, works with Samuel Cooper. Mrs. Cooper says of McLarty: "He's our colored photographer--he does the coloreds for us." And McLarty comments on his art: "I prefer black and white. It's the way people are to my eyes."

Black and white, color, formal or candid, these photos are steeped in symbolic importance. The participants are visibly tense; they want to get it right, this eternal image. None of the men know what to do with their hands. One of Martin Schweig's brides clutches a bouquet and stares terrified into the camera. A row of Bachrach bridesmaids stand cracking smiles in their porcelain white faces, as alike as the ticky-tacky boxes they stand in front of.

There are some exceptions to the "tense rule", and they are the best pictures of the exhibit. The 1875 group photo by Andrew Dahl (State Historical Society of Wisconsin) portrays an assembly of fantastic scowls; clearly these people weren't trying to say cheese for posterity. Another old picture from 1889 by Percy Byron (Museum of the City of New York) shows a group of bridesmaids and men whose faces are books of intrigue--great reading. When those photographed were not interested in the camera, unconsciously narrative moments are caught. Or conversely, Samuel Cooper's three old women at a 1950's affair are interested in anything but the wedding and their role in it--they focus on food, the camera, blank space.

A few people in Wedding aren't worrying about what they will look like in a family album. Relaxed, some are even able to smile. One particularly pompous couple included a mother in the second picture (one suspects the groom's mother, but it's hard to tell). The old lady's face wears an expectant smile, a touch senile, but beatified.

Photos like these are the funniest and happiest pictures of the exhibit. Though there are more beautiful and more impressive couples than Orion Barger's South Dakota small townies, there are none more ingeneously endearing. One couple is especially memorable in their commonplaceness, a middle-aged man sweeping a fat homely woman up in his arms. She clutches a frumpy purse in one hand and him in the other; her skirt hitches up over her knees. Probably she would blush slightly, looking at the picture later, and explain to anyone looking over her shoulder, "Oh, that's when we were younger, when we had just gotten married. We were a bit silly then." The couple in the picture don't care, they open to the camera, lit by their own laughter. Wedding is full of tensely pretentious romanticism, but this is one of the few pictures of love.